Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Ten Reasons to Take Seriously the Transhumanists, Singularitarians, Techno-Immortalists, Nano-Cornucopiasts and Other Assorted Robot Cultists and White Guys of "The Future"

ONE -- Just because futurologists tend to be both foolish and wrong doesn't mean it is always foolish to point out in public places that they are, indeed, wrong.

TWO -- In an era of urgent technodevelopmental quandaries it is actually crucial to understand technoscience questions and their developmental and distributional effects, and every second displaced onto hyperbolic futurological wish-fulfillment fantasizing and disasterbation is a second lost to that deliberation, every techo-transcendentalizing framing of the issues deranges that deliberation from sense into nonsense.

THREE -- Futurological rhetoric and fandoms represent the extreme amplification and reductio ad absurdum of the body-loathing, narcissistic death-denialism, crass materialism, complacent consumerism, technocratic elitism, market triumphalism, fraudulent profit-taking, hyperbolic deception and self-promotion that now utterly suffuses our public life through the prevalence of advertizing and marketing norms and forms and of neoliberal global developmentalist narratives and rationalizations. To grasp the ugliness and absurdity of these extreme forms is to gain insights into the pathology of many mainstream values and the deception of official elite-incumbent justifications. Where we have grown accustomed and complacent to these pathologies and deceptions looking at ourselves from the alienating margins of our own discourse can help us see ourselves and the urgency of the need to change all the more clearly.

FOUR -- Hyperbolic and deceptive futurological narratives will usually be far more attractive to superficial and sensationalist Establishment Media figures and outlets than the difficult, ambivalent, qualified, dynamic, complex realities of actual science and ongoing technodevelopmental struggles, and so the futurologists will often provide the larger rhetorical frames within the terms of which the stakes and significance of these developments are taken up by public and policy deliberation. It matters less that this is disastrous than that it is true and must be dealt with as such.

FIVE -- America is not only an incredibly rich and powerful nation that will probably remain for generations a key, and often the key, player in global technodevelopmental social struggle, it is also a profoundly anti-intellectual nation full of people who are, in consequence, especially vulnerable to the fraudulent sale-pitches of pseudo-intellectuals like futurologists, who tend either to be providing PR for corporate-military elite-incumbents or guru wannabes hoping to attract a flock to fleece.

SIX -- As Margaret Mead famously insisted, "Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world." The example of the neoliberals of the Mont Pelerin Society reminds us that a small band of ideologues committed to discredited notions that happen to benefit and compliment the rich can sweep the world to the brink of ruin and the example of the neoconservatives reminds us that a small band of even ridiculous committed people can prevail even when they are peddling not only discredited but frankly ridiculous and ugly notions. Futurologists pretend that hypberbolic marketing projections are the same thing as serious technoscience policy deliberation, which is a gesture enormously familiar to the investor class and the technology sector's customary membership, and the futurologists inevitably cast rich entrepreneurs as the protagonists of history, which is a gesture enormously attractive to the skimmers and scammers and celebrity CEOs of the technology sector's essentially narcissistic culture. Although their various predictions are rarely more accurate than those of chimpanzees at typewriters, although their various transcendental glossy-mag editorials and tee-vee ready techno-rapture narratives are rarely more scientific in their actual substance than those of evangelical preachers, although their dog and pony show sounds almost exactly the same now as it did five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago, twenty years ago, twenty-five years ago as they still drag out the same old tired litany (super-parental robot gods! genetic fountains of youth! cheap nanobotic superabundance! better than real immersive VR treasure caves! soul-uploading into shiny robot bodies!), and all with the same fervent True Belief, the same breathless insistence that this is all New! the same static repetition that change is accelerating up! up! up! it is not really surprising to discover that the various organizations associated with superlative futurology are attracting more and more money and support and attention from the rich narcissistic CEOs of the technology sector whose language they have been speaking and whose egos they have been stroking so assiduously for years and for whom they provide such convenient rationalizations for elite-incumbent rule. You better believe that, ridiculous and crazy though they may be, the Robot Cultists with well funded organizations (like the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, Global Business Network, Long Now Foundation, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology, Singularity Summit to name a few) to disseminate their pet wish-fulfillment fantasies and authoritarian rationalizations can do incredible damage in the real world.

SEVEN -- So long as people are taking futurological scenarios like "AI" let alone "Friendly Superintelligent AI" seriously we are all taking real global network security and surveillance and media misinformation issues less seriously than we should be -- And so long as people are taking futurological scenarios about "Drexlerian nanotechnology" seriously we are all taking real environmental problems and promising materials science breakthroughs at the nanoscale level less seriously than we should be -- And so long as people are taking futurological scenarios like "general assemblers," "nanofactories," and "utility fog" seriously (like so many took seriously the futurological techno-cornocopiasts before them flogging nuclear energy too cheap to meter, cheap superabudance via ubiquitous toxic plastic, universal leisure via ubiquitous robots, the high energy-input fraud of the petrochemical bio-engineered industrial-monocultural "Green Revolution," and immersive virtual reality treasure caves before them, not to mention fraudsters peddling on-the-cheap global developmental leapfrogging via boutique Green consumption or helicopter-dropped laptops, cellphones, 3-D printers right up to the present) we are all taking the crisis of global poverty, precarization, exploitation, and human trafficking less seriously than we should be -- And so long as people are taking futurological scenarios about "uploading" and "SENS" and "longevity-medicine" and "enhancement-medicine" seriously we are all taking the global maldistribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of both already-existing and actually in-development medical research and treatment less seriously than we should be, we are all taking actual medicine and the struggle to ensure its access to all less seriously than we should be -- And so long as people are taking futurological scenarios about "crypto-anarchy" "Brinian transparency" "the participatory panopticon" "online participatory democracy" seriously we are all taking the corporate-military enclosures of commons, the facilitation of global financial fraud via digital networks, the intensification of police surveillance, intrusive target marketing, punitive credit profiling via so-called "social media" together with the evacuation of the very ethos of "participation" via an internet actually defined for the majority of its users by endless posts with zero comments, drift-surfing user-generated content of deceptive dating profiles and vapid pet videos, "friending" strangers and consumer products, and scrolling insubstantial decontextualized "tweets" less seriously than we should be -- And so long as people are taking futurological scenarios about "geo-engineering" seriously we are all taking education, agitation, organization, regulation, and public investment to ameliorate anthropogenic climate change, resource descent, pollution and waste and the promotion of real-world sustainable polyculture less seriously than we should be. All of this actually matters.

EIGHT -- It is never wrong to expose a dangerous fraud as a fraud.

NINE -- It is always good to defend science against pseudo-science and promote critical thinking against True Belief.

TEN -- Even when it is not necessary, ridiculing the ridiculous is often a pleasure.

42 comments:

Dale you seem to be arguing that the opportunity-cost of taking speculative proposals about the future seriously outweighs the value of giving them positive consideration. My father once used the same argument with me on the topic of anthropogenic global warming. I didn't find it too persuasive, as it seemed to me that there is adequate evidence pointing towards it, at least to be worth taking seriously.

Well, Luke, that is one of ten arguments offered up here. One of ten. Don't like that one, there are nine more.

Also notice that even in the one argument you point to, there is a larger pattern being identified with multiple data points (every one of which also stands as a reason to be profoundly skeptical of futurology) in which futurology's hyperbolic framing and marginal concerns is said by me to function to derange and confuse our grasp and address of actually existing problems to which the futurologists actually provide no unique or substantial usefulness.

Think of the pattern -- there is surely something useful about being drawn into marginal concerns here or there, but over and over and over again? What is it about futurology that leads it incessantly to declare itself a champion of science while at once leading it right over the edge away from scientific consensus, actual research, reproducible results, favorable citation in peer-reviewed journals? What is it about futurology that leads it incessantly to declare itself concerned with technology while at once never delivering anything but CGI-renderings and scenarios (you know, sf literature, only without the characters, plots, settings, themes, or anything else that takes actual ability to write)?

By way of conclusion, I would think it matters that in your example the consensus of climate scientists are on the side of the well-warranted belief in anthropogenic climate change but there is nothing remotely like a scientific consensus supporting FAI, SENS, Drextech, uploading, or geo-engineering.

As it happens, I am not arguing against speculative proposals, scientific hypotheses are speculative, I am arguing about subcultures of relentless systematic batshit crazy futurological proposals confusing science with science fiction in the service of what amount to fraudulent faith-based initiatives for ill-gotten profit and undeserved attention. Of course I agree with you that these proposals need to be taken seriously, hence the title of the post. Futurologists are serious -- as a heart attack.

2. I reject the idea that articulating long term possibilities and aims detracts from short term research. Some people are pragmatic and some are visionaries, and in rare cases some individuals exhibit both virtues. Alan Turing is a case in point. He made a short-term, and vital contribution to the British war effort in WW2 building a pioneering code breaking computer. But he was also a visionary who anticipated artificial intelligence as early as 1950. Ray Kurtzweil is incontrovertibly a distinguished pioneering developer of technology in the fields of optical character recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. Even if his long term futurological predictions are misguided, far-fetched, or undesirable, it is apparent that his futuristic vision is the driving force behind his admirable contributions.

3.1 Regarding body-loathing and death-denialism. Please explain to me, given that medicine is an exercise in death-postponement, how being dissatisfied with corporeality, disease or death is unethical and worthy of contempt.

3.2 regarding materialism, market and consumerism. Please explain to me how the merits and demerits of capitalism are relevant to the question at hand, namely whether certain particular technological predictions and goals are a force for good or ill.

1. Isn't an argument. It's just a jeering assertion that futurologists are wrong.

Given that it is followed by arguments I personally think my snark is more than paid for. You may not be aware of the problem, but outside of the Robot Cult most people are not only NOT convinced of futurological fancies but wonder why anybody would talk their fancies seriously at all -- to anticipate this objection may not strike you as worthy of an initial throat-clearing gesture, but, here in the real world, it does.

I reject the idea that articulating long term possibilities and aims detracts from short term research

"Uploading" minds into cyber-heaven is not a "long-term" possibility it is a conceptually incoherent wish-fulfillment fantasy.

(Forsooth, if human consciousness is not negligibly materialized in organic form what can it mean to "migrate" it onto a radically different materiality without remainder, why should so conspicuously buggy and crufty and mortal a phenomenon as software be fancied as eternalizing, or given the indispensbility of a material carrier for all information why should the informational be suffused in the futurological tonalities of the spiritual?).

So too techno-immortalisms more generally (forsooth, what if sufficiently prolonged selfhood doesn't coherently mean anymore what the words "self" or "life" mean in the language being deployed, quite apart from all the pseudo-scientific ineptitudes involved in the futurological flim-flam around "longevity," from shiny robot bodies to SENS).

So too endlessly many fantasies of a circumvention of the impasse of stakeholder politics through techno-constituted superabundance, from nuclear energy too cheap to meter; to plastic fantastic luxury for the masses (I got one word for you: Plastic!); to digitality abolishing distance, obliterating states, paperlessing offices, immersing us in better than real immersive virtualies; to robots liberating the masses into universal leisure; to petrochemical industrial monoculture feeding the world; to nanocornucopiats promising cheap as dirt anything machines... again, quite apart from the endlessly many technical imbecilities mobilized by these fanciful futurological flim-flam operations, one can readily discern the citation of profoundly questionable discursive frames from which they derive their false plausibility and force.

You reject that wish-fulfilment fantasies detracts from concern with proximate quandaries even if, quite obviously, one is not deliberating on the proximate while one is indulging in the faith-based initiative just as a straightforward matter of course.

I propose you read Lanier on "cybernetic totalism" on contemporary practices of coding or my own writings about the impacts of "geo-engineering" discourse on contemporary environmentalism to see how such detraction and distortion plays out quite concretely in the real world.

3.1 Regarding body-loathing and death-denialism. Please explain to me, given that medicine is an exercise in death-postponement, how being dissatisfied with corporeality, disease or death is unethical and worthy of contempt.

The upper bound of human lifespan has never been circumvented by any therapeutic intervention and increases in life expectancy are artifacts of diminishing infant mortality and addressing heart disease. Pretending otherwise is lying to yourself or lying to others or both. To redescribe healing as nothing but death-postponement rather than improving quality of life seems to me grotesque. Every act of healing has been a caretaking of bodily life -- to assimilate this beautiful careful loving body-embracing impulse to body-loathing seems to me, again, grotesque. To connect healing practices, to death-denialism when they never have or meant to overcome mortality but to ease the dis-ease of a mortal life is simply incoherent. (And probably indicates worse in its advocates.)

3.2 regarding materialism, market and consumerism. Please explain to me how the merits and demerits of capitalism are relevant to the question at hand, namely whether certain particular technological predictions and goals are a force for good or ill.

Again, I don't accept that utterances describe as "predictions" necessarily are so. I notice that no matter how often these "predictions" fail, futurologists are regarded as precisely as secure in whatever their expertise is supposed to be. I think it is better to treat these utterances as ritual invocations that endow certain would-be transcendentalizing futurological wish-fulfillment fantasies with a reality effect through mass delusive self-reinforcement.

More directly to your point, on materialism, capitalism, and futurology, may I recommend the posts archived together here, and especially, for a start, this one?

I'd like to see evidence of large profits. 'Fraudulent' would require a demonstration that individuals or organisations are deliberately lying or using false accounting, or similar. Even if they are deluded, it does not follow that their activities are fraudulent unless deliberate deceit is involved. Robert Ettinger recently demonstrated his belief in his vision by being cryogenically preserved. Sorry to be pedantic about the word, but it really is a very serious allegation.

I accept that these organisations are proficient in marketing and self-promotion. So was Thomas Edison. Yes some individuals may have over-inflated egos. Its not a trait restricted to futurists.

As an example the Cryonics Institute is a non-profit organisations with public accounts run by enthusiasts and funded by donations. Kurtzweil is a multimillionaire from his legitimate business enterprises, not as a result of his futurology.

'Hyperbolic and deceptive futurological narratives will usually be far more attractive to superficial and sensationalist Establishment Media figures and outlets than the difficult, ambivalent, qualified, dynamic, complex realities of actual science and ongoing technodevelopmental struggles'

apart from the words hyperbolic and deceptive i think you are correct. Unfortunately most people think good news is more boring than bad news, and equally balanced coverage of long term affairs is more boring than the sensationalist sound-bite that sells. A better example would be phone hacking of celebrities and victims by the News of the World within the Fox Corporation. I don't know which is more depressing... the amoral journalists, the corrupt police who colluded, or the public's prurient voyeurism and celebrity worship.

4.2 Whether research into life extension, or brain emulation, or resurrection from cryogenetic storage is blue sky or pie-in-the-sky thinking depends on results, and the balance of scientific arguments for and against their feasibility.

It is likely that some of the futurists projections are wrong. Perhaps even all of them are wrong. Most failed business fail because their projections are wrong. Some thrive, by luck, by design, by hard work and intelligent thought.

The Human Genome Project was a risk - there was no way to know that sequencing techniques would advance quickly enough for the funding to be adequate. The Large Hadron Collider is a risk, it might find absolutely nothing and be the most expensive failed experiment in history. It doesn't mean that it was wrong to try.

America is no doubt anti-intellectual - Forest Gump, Homer Simpson, and that guy who got popular for saying he drives a truck are good examples of the celebration of stupidity.

Having said this almost all of the top rated research universities in the world are American.

Much depends on whether you would accept the distinction i would like to draw between military and non-military futurology. As examples of the former, i would cite star wars missile defence, robotics and AI for military purposes. Examples of the latter would be cryonics, SENS, AI for medical purposes, i'm thinking of IBM's Dr Watson.

6. I don't like the neo-cons either. I'm all in favour of serious science policy deliberation carried out by experts and polymaths. If this makes me an elitist then so be it.

Narcissism is an ugly characteristic, but not unique to technologists. More importantly the value of contributions to society is not diminished by the over-inflated ego, narcissistic personality, or selfish motivations of their creator. Just as the quality of Wagner's music is not diminished by his anti-semitism.

Futurists do seek 'wish-fulfillment'. This is only a bad thing if their wishes will harm other people. America was founded with the proud declaration that people have a right to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'.

These last five comments don't strike me as nearly as interesting as the earlier ones. Here's my summary of your "intervention":

"Fraud is bad and maybe not and how much are we talking about and anyway everybody does it, techno-immortalists and nano-cornucopiasts are really just entrepreneurs hell let's see what happens, marketing is fine and everybody does it, anti-intellectualism is a problem but maybe not really, narcissism is unpleasant but everybody is narcissistic, neo-cons suck but whatever, I know you say a lot about superlative futurologists being wish-fulfillment fantasists but I say they're not and anyway so what so there."

Aren't you embarrassed? Look, I don't expect everybody to agree with me but if you want to say you are responding to a piece you should actually, you know, respond to it. I like a good challenging conversation, you didn't do too badly last night. But I'm disappointed and bored with these. Now, don't sulk. Make an effort or be off with you.

Sorry to disappoint but my comments are not primarily a conversation between us, but for others reading. Its more edifying for others to see two perspectives.

I just don't see progressive struggle for a better world as incompatible with selected aspects of the transhumanist agenda. I am selective and i do attempt to follow a skeptical process of continuous reevaluation.

I think we share enough common ground for this to be a good discussion rather than two people shouting at each other's deaf ears.

Helicopter-dropped laptops and cellphones sounds like a publicity stunt - but take away the helicopter and it sounds like a good idea to me. In Afghanistan it would be more cost effective to divide the Allied military costs per head of population and then donate it. This would would beat the Marshall plan hands down.

But none of this has any relationship to the cryonics institute which i'm considering joining. I believe medical science may benefit from future resurrection attempts, and i also, more selfishly would love to see the distant future, even if the chances of this outcome are small.

7 .. on 'geo-engineering' to combat anthropogenic climate change... this is now becoming mainstream science, supported for example by the British Government and the British Royal Society (equivalent to the National Academy of Sciences). None of this means that the British government is giving up on its other carbon reducing initiatives and commitments - which unfortunately are inadequate, as is the case across the world. Sometimes the best approach to a problem is the scattergun approach. Try everything and see what works.

What a stunning insight. It remains true that nobody who wants to upload their brain into cyberspace or pop an five-century lifespan pill or have sex in the Holodek or live like a king by scooping up some dirt and throwing itnto their desktop nano-treasure maker or don their cognitive soopergenius headband is actually "doing" anything called science, policy, or philosophy. It's a scam to say otherwise and a sad delusion to believe otherwise.

Helicopter-dropped laptops and cellphones sounds like a publicity stunt -- but take away the helicopter and it sounds like a good idea to me.

Do you even know what I am referring to? Do you even know even to grasp the extent to which you are embarrassing yourself?

I believe medical science may benefit from future resurrection attempts

Christians believe their souls benefit from prayer and that they will live forever in heaven.

on 'geo-engineering' to combat anthropogenic climate change... this is now becoming mainstream science

You clearly are not sufficiently prepared to have a conversation with me. I have actually made arguments elsewhere in depth on all these topics. Needless to say, every post can't be an encyclopedic antipcipation of every idiot assertion you Robot Cultists are prone to make on every topic. Nevertheless, it isn't in any substantial sense providing information or an alternate viewpoint for you to make a series of bald assertions of belief in fututological faith-based initiatives as you are doing. Obviously, such assertions exist since it is their assertion that provides the prompt for my interventions in them, the actual arguments to which you are presumably responding. Re-asserting them in comments introduces nothing new into this conversation and manages merely to annoy me. At a minimum, you need to read a couple of my critiques of "geo-engineering" (or any of the other topics alluded to in this piece, to every one of which I have devoted countless pages), for example this and this, if you want to engage in a sustained and informed conversation with me at a greater level of specificity on these topics. This post provides a summary of the facets of my critique, putting them in one place, providing a sense of the inter-relations of dimensions of the critique. I assume a reader who is either well-versed in futurological claims or one who knows my critique well enough for these abbreviated formulations to draw on other more elaborated ones. If you want to dig deeper into the details of these separate topics you should go to the pieces where I too am digging into them. You cannot imagine I haven't already dispensed with objections at the facile level you are flinging willy-nilly here, can you? Now, please don't reply immediately. Read a bit more, reflect on your positions, else you are just wasting my time and cluttering up the Moot with noise.

Calling this a conversation or serious engagement with my arguments is insulting to me. I didn't let you get away with it, and now you feel insulted to have been exposed in the inadequacy of your effort and your understanding. If you had said anything substantive I would indeed discredit myself in refusing to address it, but you seem to want to take credit for a substance you have failed to demonstrate. I have standards and you have failed to meet them (hence, the "shrillness" and "arrogance" you sputter about). Don't worry, though, you will find plenty of reassurance back in the Robot Cult.

What matters more is that we don't need "The Future" of the futurologists, whether that "The Future" is pined for or feared.

I briefly discussed Joy's essay in a piece from way way back, here, written at a time when I am embarrassed to say I was rather more credulous about some futurological claims (I ferociously deride nano-cornucopism these days, for example).

Joy -- along with a handful of bioconservative bioethicists like Kass and Fukuyama -- seem to me to be lost in the same distorted hyperbolic cul-de-sac as the transhumanists. "The Future" for supernative as for superlative futurological discourses is surreally mimetic, with the difference that the anti-transhumanists cower in fear as before a nightmare vision where the transhumanists indulge in an incessant circle-jerk before a wish-fulfillment fantasy.

This complementarity is also evident in their respective eugenicisms (about which more here).

I have noticed that bioconservatives tend toward the neoconservative right in their politics outside of technodevelopmental questions while the transhumanists tend toward the anarcho-capitalist right in their politics, often in consequence of a difference in the role of religious belief in their lives.

Hey thanks for the prompt reply.First of all It's exactly 2 years I am reading amor mundi because I like especially the section "Superlative summary" and your opinions about the "issue" in question. For people like me, who don't speak english on a native language level, is difficult to understand sometimes properly your articles.For exemple I've totally missed the bioconservative section...because it took me some time to analize and undestand the articles.After your response I'm more motivated to read all the "bioconservative bestiary". Keep up the good work.

I'll post some links to really interesting discussions, like the one Mark Gubrud has with the extropian or the one PZ Meyers has with Kurzweil.Please read it if you find some free time.

I dunno man, maybe I could take your arguments seriously if you weren't A) So clearly in love with the sight of your own text and B)Could actually put together a blog that wasn't so painful to look at. I find it delightfully apt that I ought to demand that you, "Get with the times!"

Ah yes, the more stupidity I have the more there is left to learn. You on the other hand seem to have learned a lot acquiring your doctorate, compared to me just a lowly undergraduate. So tell me, what can I do to rid myself of this stupidity if it isn't something to be proud of?

1. To the extent that real medicine cures disease and extends the lives of those with access to it, clearly I don't say (or "insinuate") such things are impossible at all, indeed I advocate strongly for wider access to healthcare and more public investment in legitimate medical research. Most of what futurists mean by life extension is con-artistry about digital uploading and nanobotic wish-fulfillment and overpromising based on fraudulent extrapolations from qualified research results in various biomedical fields, etc.

2. It has already child to every child of two that a healthy life is better than an unhealthy one and that curing diseases and improving quality of life are good things -- futurists like to pretend that those of us who do not fall for their scams somehow disapprove of healthcare.

3. I don't care how many of the eighty or so years of life you will likely live (if you are lucky enough not to be poor or marginalized or living in an overexploited region of the world) wishing you could live a thousand years instead -- but if you lie about the likelihood of your wish coming true or about the scientific status of your faith-based pronouncements about magic sooper-techs rendering the likelihood estimates of your living a thousand years don't expect me fall for it.

These days I don't spend much time explicitly decrying this kind of futurological bullshit -- the useful idiots of transhumanism have by now mostly been discredited and banished back to the alt-reich and other cul-de-sacs, while the VC tech-bazillionaires have distilled that sad sub(cult)ure to its money-grabbing re-feudalizing sociopathic essence for the world to recoil from (possibly too late, but I think not).

1. I think we are all well aware of the fact that you don't oppose standard modern medicine. I'll be more specific. On what grounds do you deny the possible efficacy of biomedical projects that seek to combat human senescence? Alphabet's Calico, SENS Research Foundation, BioViva, Sierra Sciences, Buck Institute and the like. For instance, of Alphabet's Calico, you've said: 'nobody is likely to live a single year longer because tech CEOs are promoting futurological rhetoric'. Describing it as a waste of money. Money which would be better spent on 'real healthcare' and such.

2. Ok, then... I'll give you hypothetical. Let's say that somebody invents a medical procedure that would allow humans to live about a thousands years. What would you say to that?

3. You don't care? Are sure about that? I thought that such wishes were intrinsically pathological and evil. You know, somehow related to racism, misogyny, eugenics, corporatism, heteronormativity, militarism, manspreading, etc. But if you truly don't care, I'm happy to hear that.

I'll give you hypothetical. Let's say that somebody invents a medical procedure that would allow humans to live about a thousands years. What would you say to that?

My personal life extension strategy is not to waste another minute of my life taking people who utter that sort of line seriously, because every one of those minutes is a minute I won't get back.

I thought that such wishes were intrinsically pathological and evil. You know, somehow related to racism, misogyny, eugenics, corporatism, heteronormativity, militarism, manspreading, etc.

Death denialism indeed tends to lodge somewhere between the simply sad and the truly pathological in my experience, but if you manage to be an exception I am happy for you. In my past writings I have exposed endless rationalizations for right wing politics, racist and eugenicist attitudes, and the rest among the transhumanist futurologists, and critiques of now prevalent VC-tech discourse (of which the tranhumanists are just an extreme and clarifying variation) documenting such connections are everywhere these days. Nobody needs to read my old writings to discern these connections nowadays, and frankly it's been a while since I have written about any of this.

Your insinuation that these extensive arguments of mine and so many others with far wider audiences than I ever had amount to unsupported declarations of a connection "somehow" between "tech"-talk and racism, misogyny, militarism, corporatism and the rest reveals you to be a troll, but we both knew that already anyway, didn't we? It's all so predictable and tiring, this is why I don't do this anymore. By all means, go ahead, believe in your techno-immortalist dreams for all the good it does you. I just hope that if and when you indulge in actual fraud there will be laws to make you pay for the harm you do, and that citizens are waking up in time to the damage done in the name of deregulatary tech disruption and platform monopolies and the re-feudalizing dismantlement of public education, social supports, and the rest for upward failing sociopathic assholes drawn to futurological fictions in the first place.

My personal life extension strategy is not to waste another minute of my life taking people who utter that sort of line seriously

Notice I said 'hypothetical'. I specifically said that, so you wouldn't have to interpret that particular scenario as an actual event. And if you object to that number, fine, make it a hundred and thirty. The point (question) still stands and you keep dodging it. If life extension beyond our current biological limit were possible and attainable, how would you feel about that? That is a serious question.

Death denialism

If you die at the age of one thousand, you're still dead.

Your insinuation that these extensive arguments of mine and so many others with far wider audiences than I ever had amount to unsupported declarations of a connection "somehow" between "tech"-talk and racism, misogyny, militarism, corporatism and the rest...

Later on, in this very comment, you hope that future legislative action will 'make me pay' for some nebulous wrongs that I might commit. Clearly you are identifying something unscrupulously evil about the mere wish to live a thousand years. I can only conclude that you stand by those declarations.

...reveals you to be a troll, but we both knew that already anyway, didn't we?

One post ago you casually likened/linked me to the 'alt-reich' and you did so out of the blue. As a matter of fact, you can't even write a full paragraph without insulating somebody or something. And I'm the troll? Golly!

go ahead, believe in your techno-immortalist dreams for all the good it does you.

I've never said that I believe in any of it. That's not how I roll. And that 'immortalist' bit is a full on non-sequitur, because literally nothing that I've said is related to immortality. Hell, ever Kurzweil doesn't believe in immortality.

I just hope that if and when you indulge in actual fraud there will be laws to make you pay for the harm you do

You get the last word, and it is the last. I don't care what you think, and I am not interested in convincing you of anything. Draw whatever dire conclusions you want from that. This isn't my first trip to the rodeo with futurological time-wasters. And no smiley face for you.

Thank you for the informative discussion, Dale. Though I have to say, I felt it was missing something. Something very crucial to every worthwhile discussion... Hmmm... Wait, I know! Diversity! Yes, that explains a lot. You see, the problem is that you, Dale, are a hideously white cishet-passing male. Surely that amount of patriarchal privilege looms over every thought you're ever had. I guess that's why we made so little progress. But not to worry, I'll carry on! Next time I'll try to get my ludditism from a transsexual Ugandan midget. Who knows, they might actually answer a question or two.

PS Even your own ilk thinks that you can't write for shite (check the recent posts on Reddit's SneerClub).

PPS Sorry for the late reply, I was on my third vacation this year. My investments in AI companies sure pay a pretty penny. ;)